From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Tuesday, May 20th. From afar, many of us saw the odd agitator pop up on the federal election campaign trail, where they yelled at politicians or others like an indigenous elder on Anzac Day. And we thought they were just the actions of random ratbags. But watching on was crime reporter
Sharon Crock, who discovered something unusual. A small but sophisticated group of people involved in many of these incidents had links to neo-Nazis. Today, Sharon Rocks joins me to discuss the rise of neo-Nazis in Australia and the steps they're taking to form a political party. So, Sharon, can you please take us back to the run up to the federal election, which is when you noticed some agitators, I guess, popping up at various press stops doing various stunts. What were they doing?
Yeah. So you probably noticed this election got pretty wild. And something that happened, which we hadn't really seen as much of before, were these coordinated confrontations with politicians. It started on the very first day of the campaign. The Prime Minister and the treasurer were heckled by a guy asking questions about immigration.
1.8 million immigrants in five years is going to increase demand on the medical system.
They also held a rally outside a liberal senator's office in their full, you know, black masks earlier in the campaign.
Is swamping us with Third World populations. And the Labor Party is dragging us into third world conditions.
Then they actually ambushed the prime minister in his hotel lobby.
Elbow.
How do you feel about the rise in immigration, mate? Do you think it's fair? Yep. Thank you. Do you think it's fair?
And a white supremacist crashed a forum in Kooyong that went a bit nuts when an older woman actually threw a punch at him.
Relation between immigration and immigration. Back off, back off. When will you address it? Are you also scared to address it? You say that you don't have any problem with political donations.
I realized you sort of all of a sudden that the men behind these stunts had personal connections to known neo-Nazis. So either they were friends. They'd been photographed with Nazis at their events recently, or they were part of the Lads Society, which was the early club run by the main neo-Nazi leader in Australia, Thomas Sewell. So look, I knew the Nazis had done well at pushing deeper into the far right during Covid and all the anti-vax, anti-lockdown
stuff that really sprung up then. But it wasn't until the election that I saw just how central they'd become. And then, of course, A group of neo-Nazis booed during the Anzac Day dawn service. And they kind of came out into the open, so we were able to kind of pick them out as Nazis pretty quickly then. But in the last week of the campaign, things got even wilder because these known neo-Nazis started impersonating the Liberal Party
at early voting centres. One guy was handing out anti-Semitic flyers in a blue T-shirt.
Liberal party, great policies.
It looks like the Liberal Party branding. But when you looked closer, you could see a Star of David and the flag on the logo. And there were guys there in costume beards and fake Jewish Orthodox clothing. It was really offensive. And the Flyers were claiming the liberals wanted to give Jewish people free money.
We need to give Jews free money because we know the Jews are a little short on cash. Right? So Liberal Party website, these are our policies and not our policies from Liberal Party. I'm just a big fan. I'm a dumb goy. I'm a convert.
And they did the same thing with the Labor Party. Actually they Actually, they handed out these fake red flyers making racist claims about Indian migration. So look, Nazis doing stunts isn't new, but this sneakier strategy of teaming up with others in the far right who were more like Nazi adjacent, let's say, than open neo-Nazis, seemed like a shift in tactics to me. So I decided to take a closer look.
Okay, so can you just take a step.
Back for a moment and just explain to us who are these neo-Nazis?
So neo-Nazis have been active in Australia for a while, recruiting young men like training in combat and weapons and plotting, building their own white order from their sort of homes and gyms. But experts who tracked them online say they're more organized than ever. This group are called the National Socialist Network or the NSN, and they're the biggest Nazi group in Australia. So when we talk about neo-Nazis, we're
mostly talking about them. They're based in Melbourne, but they have chapters around the country and they're one of the most high profile neo-Nazi groups in the world, really, which I hate to mention because they love the publicity. But, you know, their numbers aren't actually even that huge. It's just that they're dedicated. They'll bus members into a rally in their black bucket hats and boots. They'll hold up their racist signs. Sometimes they'll do a Nazi salute. They're
successful here because they run what's called an active club model. Basically, they get young men in by offering a boxing and fitness club camping trips, and members actually pay a fee every month to be part of this group. And that's when they start indoctrinating them in their Nazi ideologies and Hitler worship. And it is full on worship. I mean, they recently celebrated Adolf Hitler's birthday. Tom Sewell, he's the most well known. He runs the group. He's already been
convicted for a string of violent offenses. But back in sort of the earlier days, he and the group were less open about what they were. So Saul would be telling recruits, you know, let's build our own white neighborhood so that one day we can overthrow the rest of society and start mass deportations of people of color. And then he brought in people like Jacob Hassan, who was running around with his own little anti-Semitic graffiti and stunts like that. And that's the guy that booed on Anzac Day.
So they were kind of less keen on politics up until now. Um, they thought the only way to achieve their goals was to speed up this coming collapse of society and seize power. And these guys are serious people. I mean, some of their members have been part of terror groups like the base combat 18 or bikie clubs, prison gangs. But now we're kind of seeing in this new generation of Nazi, they're getting better at recruiting, and their problem is they keep getting nabbed more and more
by the cops. You know, the cops are actually starting to take them pretty seriously. And we're seeing these new laws come in. So now they're sort of turning back to this idea of playing the sneaky Nazis. Tom Sewell has put it to his followers so they can break into the mainstream. And that was kind of the point of the Anzac Day stunt. And some of the stuff we saw on the election trail this morning.
I'm here to welcome everybody to my father's country. Beautiful boomerang country. But before we do that, we pay our acknowledgments and we pay our respects.
So the shrine stunt was planned for a while on Anzac Day. There were about 40 neo-Nazis there. It turns out, along with their wives, they were all spread out throughout the crowd. They didn't want the media to realise it was them and one of the main Nazis, Joel Davis. He's since spoken about this online. He said they'd expected it would just be reported as Australians fed up and spontaneously booing the Welcome to Country and, of course Peter Dutton.
He condemned the stunt, but he also seized on it to criticise welcome to country ceremonies. And Joel Davis has been joking for a while that, say Clive Palmer's trumpet for Patriots Party stole their idea with all his ads about, you know, railing against Welcome to Country, which the major media outlets ran, including us, I should say. So to some extent, the Nazis succeeded in hijacking the national debate in those final weeks of the campaign. Since we outed them,
they've actually since kind of run with it. And they've declared war on both the major parties. Now they've actually planning to go after the liberals in particular, as traitors for backing recent anti-vilification laws which have been passed in states like Victoria. So they really want to tear down the libs so they can kind of create this new coalition of far right micro-parties who were more sympathetic to their ideas, and it turns out they're actually making a run at politics themselves.
We'll be right back. Well, I really want to ask you this, because this is sort of at the crux of, I guess, where this could go next. And really about your reporting, which is that the NSN, the National Socialist Network, this group you're talking about, they are actually trying to form a political party. So I guess, how far into this process are they?
Yes. So they have this kind of sneaky plan where they want to register with the Australian Electoral Commission to stand candidates for the next federal election. And they've already got a slick propaganda wing set up. They actually just dropped like a couple of days ago. This kind of self-styled documentary, which features a lot of boxing and clips of them facing off with the cops in a very strange rants about needing to be a militant force to
take back Australia for the white man. The experts are saying to me, even if they don't get anyone up at the ballot box, the tactic could help them in a couple of ways. They could gain more of this false legitimacy as they push further into right wing politics. You know, popping up as just everyday citizens asking reasonable questions. Or it could actually help them evade a crackdown by authorities.
So Sule can't meet with the group technically, but he does these kind of little lonely live streams where he talks about his plans to followers. So Sule has spoken about how lucky they are so far not to have been designated a terror group like the bass and other
groups they know have overseas. So Sule argues they have to outmaneuver the cops, and he wants to kind of do it by forming a political party without the overt National Socialist Nazi branding as a way to kind of, you know, call it all political expression.
And tell us, though, I mean, how do you think this group.
Will actually go with regards to getting a political party off the ground?
Well, I mean, it's hard to imagine Australians actually electing an out and proud Nazi. I mean, but they might be successful in elevating, say, a far right candidate who shares their radical views on immigration. And and again, is part of that more sneaky Nazi adjacent cohort. neo-Nazi groups around the world have sort of taken the polarisation of politics that we've seen of late, particularly under Donald Trump. And the US is a bit of a, you know,
open season for recruiting. And I know the Nazis here do talk about the return of the far right in Germany, for example, as a bit of a guiding light for them. But when you talk to other extremism experts, like Josh Roose, for example, he said to me, look, you know, in in Australia at least, we've seen massive backlash to Trump. And that hurt Peter Dutton in the Liberal Party. So
that could also hurt their political plans. Also their criminal convictions could start to pile up enough that their main leaders can't actually serve anymore. Or what you might see, which is what often happens with far right parties, is they might all just sort of turn on each other.
I mean, these other little micro parties like the libertarians, one nation, they might not like sharing the stage with the Nazis or, you know, everyone wants to be Führer, so the group itself might tear itself apart trying to actually find a leader and find someone to stand. So none of this is inevitable just because they get up it or they they register a party. It doesn't mean that they're about to take power in Australia like they love to talk about, but it does mean we should
take them seriously. And on face value, you might look at these plants. It's just ridiculous. Like as if this is ever going to happen. But all the experts, they say to me, look, these guys are serious and they're dangerous. So we need to be really alert.
And I'm just.
Wondering, I have to ask, you know, given all the scrutiny on so many of these members, why have they not been banned? You know, by ASIO or by our government or by anybody really?
That's the million dollar question. What I hear is that unless the group are sort of caught in the act of planning a violent event, it is very hard to designate them as an all out terror group. And certainly with this new round of anti-vilification laws, which is still to come in in Victoria, and the new round of actually banning Nazi symbols, that has cracked down and started to narrow what they can get away with, and they are starting to be pinged more and more. There's been
raids on their houses more and more. So they know they're in a more tenuous landscape now with what they can get away with. But yes, they are yet to be designated, and that would really change the game. And it's what they fear the most.
Well, Sharon, we're lucky you're reporting in this space. So thank you so much for your time.
Thanks, Samantha.
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by myself, Julia Katzel, and Margaret Gordon, with technical assistance by Josh towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom McKendrick is our head of audio. The Morning Edition is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. To support our journalism,
subscribe to us by visiting The Age or smh.com.au. Subscribe and sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a comprehensive summary of the day's most important news, analysis and insights in your inbox every day. Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. This is the morning edition. Thanks for listening.